If there was a subforum for Open/Free/Net I would have posted there and I didn't want to post the same thread 3 times and make alot of friends so here I am.

Can anybody running any of the Big 3 on UltraSparc tell me their impressions. Happily I find myself rolling in Sparc servers at the moment and although some of them will shortly be home to Solaris which I'm really coming to like on Intel, I want to get back to BSD. I've been away too long. Thanks guys.

OpenBSD-4.9 on an Ultra5. It's rock solid. I'm using it to run a voice chat server (uMurmur), so it's heavily under-utilized, but I plan on increasing the load it carries as soon as I get some of my intel machines unfscked.

Thanks and good to hear. I don't see much activity on the sparc lists for any of the big 3 so I don't really have an idea what's going on. I hope all the cheap hardware flooding the market as well as oracle's recent announcement are going to revive interest and development on these boxes. They're too good to die.

Absolutely. As soon as I expand my infrastructure at home a bit, I plan on getting a few more (hopefully bigger) ultrasparcs. The biggest fault with an ultrasparc is that they outlive their "obsolete" stage...I mean, they make awesome home firewalls and servers, but no one is going to use an Ultra5 in a corporate environment anymore even if it can still do the job (that's how I got mine for free...sysadmin saw it was a 400 MHz box and granted me dibs before he tossed it).

This server will probably outlive my wife's brand new Windows 7 machine, and the server is already 10+ years old. Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

Absolutely. As soon as I expand my infrastructure at home a bit, I plan on getting a few more (hopefully bigger) ultrasparcs. The biggest fault with an ultrasparc is that they outlive their "obsolete" stage...I mean, they make awesome home firewalls and servers, but no one is going to use an Ultra5 in a corporate environment anymore even if it can still do the job (that's how I got mine for free...sysadmin saw it was a 400 MHz box and granted me dibs before he tossed it).

This server will probably outlive my wife's brand new Windows 7 machine, and the server is already 10+ years old. Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

Yeah that's how I got my Sun mountain as well. They were going to toss these machines. I see perfectly good Sun boxes selling on ebay by the pallet load. It's almost a crime to think how many are going to the scrapheap when they're perfectly good.

That's interesting. I didn't realize that but it does explain why the AMD64 packages were so thin last time I checked. I though it would have been the obvious development environment.

AMD is little-endian and Sparc is big-endian so obviously AMD can not be development environment. However, I am surprised that you found a problems with AMD64 packages since that is what most developers use outside of the development. I would guess that AMD64 is the most installed version (maybe even the best tested) of OpenBSD.

But, given the big-endian vs. little-endian polarities, sparc64 and amd64 are the two most heavily tested arch's that I see.

Ok, good to know. Thanks rocket. BTW I have no complaints with Open. It just works. I understand the packages I want aren't popular packages and I don't blame the guys for not making them. I can build my own in most cases, but there was one case I couldn't, and not having that meant I couldn't use Open for my main desktop. I'll try it again on one of my servers soon.

AMD is little-endian and Sparc is big-endian so obviously AMD can not be development environment. However, I am surprised that you found a problems with AMD64 packages since that is what most developers use outside of the development. I would guess that AMD64 is the most installed version (maybe even the best tested) of OpenBSD.

Hmm you lost me there Oko. I know Sparc is big endian (like the machines I work on which is one more thing to like about it) but since most OpenBSD runs on Intel 86 and 64 why couldn't Intel be the development environment? And then use each machine family for porting?

In FreeBSD I found many ports simply broken and when I email the maintainer they say oh yeah it doesn't work on AMD64. What really sucked is it often went for an hour or so compiling and downloading huge files just to stop in the middle of the build with a "is not support on this platform" message. You couldn't have told me that at the start?

In OpenBSD I didn't find any broken packages, just several packages I wanted don't exist at all for AMD64. That was a few releases ago and I have been busy with other things and didn't have enough boxes so while I usually have machines with all the big 3 BSD and Linux I am back to only Linux and Solaris Intel at the moment. I hope to fix that with Open and maybe Free on Sparc and Solaris Sparc.

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Multibooting with LILO

Last edited by Randux; 26th June 2011 at 08:35 AM.
Reason: forgot to use the right terms, in FreeBSD I build from ports